"A young male grizzly bear was just chilling, soaking up the rays not far from Wonder Lake in Denali National Park [in Alaska]," McGeorge recalled. "Bears are one of my favorite animals to photograph."

Photos by Graham McGeorge The blend of an Eastern screech owl's protective coloring was captured by wildlife photographer Graham McGeorge in the Okefenokee Swamp. The photograph has received national attention.

Graham McGeorge was pretty certain he was going to get a good photo when he set out early one morning about a year ago. He’d been told where the screech owl’s nest was, in the hollow of a pine tree not far from the trail in the Okefenokee Swamp.

He got out there before dawn, lugging all his camera equipment. He set up his tripod, his camera with the big lens. And he waited.

“The owl would come out,” he said, “but then would get scared by people on the trail and go back inside.”

So he kept waiting. Wildlife photography is usually a waiting game, anyway. And spring had come early to the swamp that year.

“It was bad,” he said. “The yellow flies were out. The mosquitoes were out.”

He had a bug net covering his head, at times almost as essential to wildlife photography as a camera. And he spent seven or eight hours out there that day, standing no more than 25 feet from that pine tree, shooting photo after photo every time the owl showed even a corner of its face.

“I pretty much knew that once I found the nest, I had something special,” he said. “I probably shot 10 gigabytes of raw images that day.”

In layman’s terms, that means he’d shot hundreds of photos. Maybe a thousand. But there was one that was just right, the one in that thousand. The owl stood in full pose in the hollow, but blending in.

Bark and feathers, feathers and bark.

He calls that image “Master of Disguise.”

In the past year, a lot of people have taken notice of that owl that blends in so well to the pine tree. Three weeks ago, it was featured on the TV show “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” as an example of natural camouflage. It’s appeared in numerous magazines. It will be in a National Geographic children’s book coming out in November.

And next year, it will accompany one of the months in one of the National Audubon Society’s 2015 calendars.

All pretty heady stuff for a plumber from Dumfries, Scotland, who still carries the thick accent of home.

McGeorge came to the United States 20 years ago for a very simple reason: “I met my wife.”

They lived in New York before moving to Jacksonville nine years ago. He’s a union plumbing foreman by trade. But his passion is outdoor photography.

“I’ve always been interested in photography, but never really had the money for any good equipment until the last eight or 10 years,” he said. “I love the outdoors, I love hiking. It all goes hand in hand.

“I just wish I could do it for a living. But when I’m done here today at 3:30, I’m on the road.”

So he sells photos through his website. He has agents in London and New York who get him placed in publications. The money isn’t great, he said. “Cosmos” paid $200. National Geographic was $175.

“The biggest you’ll ever get is a magazine feature, maybe $700-$800,” he said.

All that adds up and pays for his annual trips to Alaska, or maybe Wyoming or Montana. There they tromp through the woods, prairie and tundra, camera gear in hand.

“Always,” he said, “and it drives my wife nuts. It must weigh 40 pounds and it gets pretty heavy. She thinks I’m not having fun. But you never know what you’re going to see out west.”

But he finds photos closer to home, too. A photo of bonobos at Jacksonville Zoo & Gardens will go up in October at the Smithsonian Institution as part of the Nature’s Best Photography exhibition.

A photo of a great horned owl in Jacksonville Beach won a weekly contest in National Geographic’s Traveler 2014 contest.

McGeorge enters his photos in a lot of contests. The most he’s won has been $1,000 or so. But the attention is key.

“National Geo, that’s how you’re going to get noticed,” he said. “Photo editors all over the world go there.”

In the meantime, McGeorge will fly, drive and hike to where he thinks he can get the best photos of wildlife. When the rare snowy owl showed up on Little Talbot Island in January, McGeorge figured he was out there seven or eight times, four to six hours at a time.

“I’ll stand at an eagle’s nest for seven, eight hours like it’s nothing, for one shot,” he said. “I wish you could just walk up and get it in five minutes. But you can’t.”